Recently during a consulting engagement with a Fortune 100 client and again during a Design Jam with IFTF (Institute For the Future), I’ve had the opportunity to teach others a bit about cryptography, blockchains and the Metacurrency Project.

I’ve been getting asked to share more of the technical side of Distributed Computing and Digital Trust as of late. This is a 10 minute tutorial video that walks through the basics of Public Key Cryptography and the role that it plays in enabling secure communication today.

In this talk at Stanford, Paul Borrill dives into an exploration of physics, computer science and philosophy that closely mirrors the insights that have guided us on the metacurrency project. These discoveries have led us to try to re-design computation and networks based on organizing patterns found in nature. We believe that Continue reading

The promise of a better world motivates many of us to strive in pursuit of “abundance.” But what are the downsides of framing our pursuits in this way? In this interactive salon, I guided participants through an exploration of the relationship between abundance, pain, scarcity and steering — and presented an alternative foundation for harnessing noble ambitions as well as Continue reading

The LA Times recently ran an op-ed by Bryan Dean Wright advocating for the creation of a Data Mining Royalty Fund — in part as a way to provide a basic income to people whose jobs will be eliminated in the near future by robots and artificial intelligence.

Jaron Lanier and others have advocated similar schemes. In my opinion, they miss the point. The point isn’t “can we monetize” our private information instead of only “others” monetizing our private info. The point is: how do we “steer ourselves as a community most effectively.”

This author’s proposal is most accurately thought of as a community subsidy.
A subsidy doesn’t help us steer. In fact, it inhibits steering. And trading privacy away for sheckels isn’t Continue reading